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Sources, Destinations, and Routing

So far, we've looked at the features of Edge that you might see in any agent. Let's look at some of the things that make Edge different – like the fact that you have the power of Cribl Stream baked into the agent.

If you're familiar with Stream, configuring things in Edge is going to feel second nature. And if you're not familiar with Stream, feel free to check out our other sandboxes.

So far, we've been looking at the basic stats from the Edge Nodes. Now we're going to send metrics to a Prometheus Destination, and we want the full complement of metrics...

Configuring our System Metrics Source
  1. From the default_fleet page, click More in the upper submenu, and then select Sources.
  2. Click on the System Metrics tile.
  3. On the resulting Manage Sources/System Metrics page, click on the in_system_metrics Source that's already set up for you.
  4. In the resulting config modal, click on the Host Metrics left tab.
  5. Click on the All button (next to Basic). We want them all!
  6. Click Save button at the bottom right.

We've now got detailed metrics configured. Let's send them to Prometheus and take a look at them. We've already got a Prometheus Destination setup, so let's send our metrics there using Edge's graphical QuickConnect UI.

Routing our data to Prometheus

  1. From Edge's submenu, click Collect .

    You should now see a QuickConnect page, looking something like this: QuickConnect View Right now, our metrics data is being sent to the DevNull Destination, which simply discards it. Let's change that.

  2. On the DevNull tile, click the blue connector from the System Metrics Source, and drag it over to the Prometheus Destination tile.

  3. In the resulting confirmation modal, click OK. (If, instead of the confirmation modal, you see a Connection Configuration modal, select Passthru and click Save.)

  4. Click the Commit & Deploy button at Edge's upper right.

  5. In the resulting confirmation modal, click Commit and Deploy.

Don't See a Commit & Deploy Button?
  • If you see separate buttons for Commit and Deploy, click on Commit, enter a commit message (if one is not already present), and click Commit Changes. Then click the Deploy button and confirm again in the resulting confirmation modal.
  • If you don't see Commit & Deploy and you don't see separate Commit and Deploy buttons, look at the top of your Edge UI. If it has a purple outline, then you've navigated into one of the Nodes. You can make changes in the individual Nodes, but they will not persist (they will be overwritten by the next Commit & Deploy of the Fleet). In order to navigate back to the Fleet, click the close box [X] at the top right of the purple banner.

It's as simple as that. Once the Edge Nodes get the new configuration, metrics will start flowing to our Prometheus Instance. Let's take a look...

Metric Exploration
  1. In the top tabs bar, click on the Prometheus tab.
  2. You should see the Graph query page, like this: Prometheus (If you don't, click on the Graph link at the top of the Prometheus UI.)
  3. In the query bar, type the word node – you should start to see a drop-down list of metrics that relate to the word node. If you don't, wait a minute or so, and try again. It's likely that the Edge Node is still getting its config.

You can scroll through the list to see what metrics Edge provides. Click a metric, followed by the Execute button, to display the results in the Table view. Click the Graph tab to generate a graph of the same data.

Take a few minutes to explore the Node metrics, and then we'll take a look at Log File Autodiscovery.